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CHAPTER 1

EXPERIENCING THE FULLNESS OF TIME

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In the Midwestern town where I live, all the children are required to buy datebooks at the beginning of fourth grade. Not just the little pamphlet calendars printed by greeting card companies, like the ones in which I recorded my friends' birthdays as a child. And not grids on which to write class times and assignments. But datebooks, like the ones business executives often carry.

Three decades of keeping datebooks of my own make me suspicious of this policy. It's not that I have anything against datebooks, for certain purposes. Mine helps me remember when I'm supposed to meet a colleague or see the dentist or send in a report. It jogs my memory, and it decreases the likelihood that I will agree to be in two places at the same time. But a datebook can also become the focus of tension and strain, as it is in those moments when I hold it, pen in hand, realizing that to be in two places at the same time is exactly what someone is demanding of me. Moreover, the flat pages of a datebook can become a template not simply for organizing time but also for visualizing what time is: a sequence of little boxes, each waiting to be filled. As the owner of this time, I imagine, my role is to look down on these boxes from above and determine what goes where. Being busy enough to need a book with larger pages is a sign of success. Being deliberate enough to block out certain boxes for reading, exercise, or family is a sign of wisdom.

In fact, we live not outside and above time but within it. Nature and culture craft its units — days, weeks, and years — and how many of these we will finally have is not up to us. Time is a given, and time is a gift. We receive it in increments that flow from the future into the past, a certain number of hours each day, a certain number of days each year, a certain span of life whose duration we do not know in advance. Making good use of the time we are given is important, to be sure, and datebooks and other aids help us to do this. But when our emphasis on using time displaces our awareness of time as gift, we find that we are not so much using time as permitting time to use us.

This is what is happening to more and more of us, more and more often. These days, it can seem that time itself is out of kilter. Grave imbalances exist for almost everyone. Some people are vastly overworked and vastly overpaid, others work too long and earn too little, and others work seldom, if at all. And however much or little we work, the time we do have is losing its shape as round-the-clock employment, shopping, and entertainment blur the boundaries between one season and another, between day and night. No wonder we turn to our datebooks in the hope that they can help us get back in control. When we require them of fourth graders, what are we communicating to them about the society in which they live? Are we preparing them to enter an economy that intends to squeeze every minute out of them, sooner or later?

Historians, economists, and sociologists are trying to understand how this system came into being, and some of them are even proposing ways in which the structures of the workplace might be changed to correct its imbalances. Our trouble with time goes much deeper than the social sciences can fathom, however. At the heart of our attitudes and experience of time are issues of identity and conscience, matters of the spirit. I think of a good friend who had a day off, a precious open day in which she could do whatever she chose, or nothing at all. When her husband came home, there she was with her feet up, reading a magazine. He was happy for her, but she was embarrassed. And so she leaped to her feet, explaining that before this quiet interlude she had done the laundry, made some important phone calls, and helped with their daughter's homework. "Congratulations," he chuckled. "You have earned the air you breathe. Now sit back down!"

Time, my friend had said, though not in so many words, is there to be "used." Having "wasted" it, she felt guilty. Happily, her husband's gracious remark let her enjoy the rest of that day. But for her, as for so many of us, time continues to be a source not only of pressure but also of guilt and judgment. We forget how to luxuriate in time that is not filled with tasks. We delude ourselves into believing that if we can just get everything done, if we can only tie up all the loose ends, if we can even once get ahead of the crush, we will prove our worth and establish ourselves in safety.

Our problem with time is social, cultural, and economic, to be sure. But it is also a spiritual problem, one that runs right to the core of who we are as human beings. Distortions in the shape of our time foster distortions in the shape of our lives and the quality of all of our relationships. Indeed, these distortions drive us into the arms of a false theology: we come to believe that we, not God, are the masters of time. We come to believe that our worth must be proved by the way we spend our hours and that our ultimate safety depends on our own good management.

How might our experience of time change if we could learn to receive time as a gift of God? How might this open us to live more fully?

Busy people may think that what we need is a few more open boxes on the pages of our datebooks. But in fact that would provide only a flat and short-lived remedy, and not only because those boxes would soon fill up like all the others. What we really need is time of a different quality. We need the kind of time that is measured in a yearly round of feasts and fasts, in a life span that begins when a newborn is placed in her parents' arms, and in a day that ends and begins anew as a line of darkness creeps across the edge of the earth. This kind of time exists, but we have learned not to notice it. Our gaze is fixed instead on a datebook, some of us anxiously hoping to squeeze into its little boxes all that we must do, others weeping to see that so many of the pages are blank.

Looking at time through the lens of Christian faith, however, we do notice time of such quality. In the creation hymn that begins the Jewish and Christian scriptures, the first act of God is to create light and, seeing that it is good, to separate it from darkness. This is the beginning of time, which from that moment on bears the forms of Day and Night, as God's first gifts are repeated again and again (Genesis "Yours is the day, yours also the night," sings the psalmist to the Creator (Psalm 74:16). Throughout the continuing saga of God's people, it is on these that God will hang blessing after blessing. Even when desolate and far from home, prophets declare that God's mercies are "new every morning" (Lamentations 3:23).

Through this lens we also discover the sabbath and understand that God intends for us to have time for rest as well as for work. We perceive that even heavy and painful time — forty rainy nights on an ark, forty years of wandering in a wilderness, three days when our dearest friend lies in a tomb — can prepare the way for new life. We get a lesson in how God's gracious arithmetic upsets the ways of the world, as the laborers who work in the vineyard for only one hour receive the same reward as the ones who work all day long (Matthew 20:1–16). While the culture is counting time, we are also seeing it fulfilled: an exiled people returns home, a promised child is born (Isaiah 40:1–5; Luke 2:25–33).

We can find our way into this kind of time. It is there awaiting our notice. If we are to see it and live within it, however, we need to be able to look beyond the taken-for-granteds of our present experience of time. We need to imagine the possibility of thinking beyond the assumptions of our culture. We need to understand the many dimensions of time and our own immersion in all of them.

The Meanings and Morals of Time

How time is organized is a fundamental building block of any way of life. This is elementary, as every schoolchild learns upon being acclimated to the bells that signal the beginning and end of the school day. Knowing when to show up, and knowing that other people will show up, is a first step into any social setting. Once inside, we learn the details: how fast to move through the hallways, how seriously to take each deadline, when to work hard and when to slack off a little.

Our approach to time is so deeply ingrained in our habits that we are unaware of how powerfully it shapes us at every level. We become accustomed to a certain tempo, to unspoken rules, and soon these patterns come to feel like second nature. At one level, they enable us to get along in the corner of the world in which we find ourselves. At another level, however, they knit in us designs that become part of our very identity, for good and for ill.

Somehow, growing up, most of us develop notions of how "good" people handle time. Where I come from, these notions are pretty clear, even if they are rarely explicit. Good people are not the ones derided in the nursery rhyme about "a diller, a dollar, a ten-o'clock scholar" who doesn't get to school until noon. They are not the ones who fritter their time away. They don't forget appointments. Instead, they turn things in on time, and after something is over they know when it's time to leave. They waste neither their own time nor other people's.

Time carries lots of moral freight. Being kept waiting, for example, can arouse remarkable rage in people who are usually fairly pleasant. I fear that my tardiness has awakened such passion in the person nearest and dearest to me on more than one occasion. For my part, I am embarrassed to admit that I am capable of both considering his impatience a moral flaw in him and growing just as impatient myself when others are late. Fortunately, I am usually close to punctual, and so are most of my acquaintances. Even more fortunately, our rages are not likely to reach the proportions attained by the media tycoon Robert Maxwell, who fired his son for being late in picking him up at the airport.

"People tend to be very moralistic, rigid and defensive about their own, and other people's, time keeping behaviour," the British sociologist Jenny Shaw reports in an article in the international journal Time and Society. The norms governing punctuality are "unforgiving," she says, and thus are sources of both pride and blame. Almost everyone describes themselves as punctual, though they have no trouble admitting that they often fall short in other virtues, such as tidiness. In Shaw's study, punctuality emerges as the stuff of manners and courtesy, of "everyday ethics." To my more theological ears, the words and emotions inherent in this discussion also ring with the overtones of sin and salvation, of judgment and grace.

Grace can seem in short supply indeed once we begin to think that whoever "uses time well" is right with God and that whoever "wastes" time is committing sin. This judgment is not unfamiliar on the American cultural and political landscape. Often called "the Protestant ethic," this attitude holds that work and worthiness go hand in hand, not only in human eyes but in God's. This label is incongruous, since the Protestant movement actually began with the insistence that God's favor is a free gift. Such a gift can seem too good to be true, however, whether we are Protestants or not, and thus many of us try to attract God's favor by putting our virtue and hard work on display. When we get caught up in this effort, it can seem that success in work is the proof that we have succeeded in our faith as well. I wonder, however, what kind of faith this is: where are love and trust and forgiveness, even for the "successful"? And I worry about the shadow side of this ethic, which heaps condemnation on those who fail to prosper, whether by their own doing or not.

Cultural differences also fuel confusion and condemnation. Everyday approaches to time vary immensely from one place to another. Robert Levine, a social psychologist, learned this when teaching a summer course at a university in Brazil. Upon his arrival in Rio, he made an appointment with his department head and, naturally, got to her office on time. He was surprised and chagrined, however, that she showed up forty minutes late. Then she delayed their conversation for an additional ten minutes, only to cut it short soon after it began because she had to go to another meeting set for the same time. This behavior on the part of a pleasant and well-regarded person puzzled Levine as much as it angered him. Later that day, his puzzlement intensified as several students lingered in his own office far past the appointed end of their meeting time. Still later, a prospective landlord kept him waiting and then broke off their negotiations when Levine expressed his dismay.

Time, Levine realized, ran differently in Brazil than it did in California. The question was, how differently? On a subsequent trip around the world, the basis for his book A Geography of Time, he found patterns as diverse as the countries he visited, each governed by rules hidden deep in the unexamined consciousness of its citizens. His own understanding of what time people should arrive and how long they should stay, Levine came to see, was not "right," as if it were engraved in the book of nature. It was, rather, part of the grammar of his own culture.

Sometimes it takes a visit to a faraway place to help us see how peculiar our own timeways are. But sometimes we can learn this simply by going next door. Two churches in my hometown, located just a few blocks apart, speak time in quite different accents. At one, folks get there when they can, and worship takes as long as it needs to. At the other, people notice (and vaguely disparage) latecomers, and many start to fidget if it looks like the service may run a little longer than its allotted hour. My native culture makes my way with time closer to that of the second congregation; I confess that I have even fidgeted, on occasion, when a service there runs "too long." And so when I first attended the more laid-back congregation, my first impulse was to pass judgment on its ways with time — to frown on someone who was late or fretfully to wish that things would hurry on to a timely benediction. It did not take me long to figure out that these thoughts violated the culture of that place. What did take me quite a while was figuring out that my more hurried ways seemed odd, even wrong, to the people gathered there.

Sharing time at a particular pace had formed each congregation in a particular style of living. More important, sharing time had provided each with the basic ingredient of shared living itself, making it possible for each to become a community. Without sharing time, and sharing it in sufficient amounts to let community take root and grow, it is impossible to share a common life with other people. When time is withheld, community withers.

Late one December, our next-door neighbors invited us and the others on our block to an open house. About half of us were fairly new to the area; the other half, including our hosts, had lived there for more than three decades. I think they wanted to tell us newcomers about the warmth and friendship that had run up and down our street as children ran from yard to yard while their parents partied on one of the patios. Every summer weekend, a volleyball net went up on the back lot. The snapshots they showed us portrayed their younger selves, arms linked and faces shining. Our new neighbors wanted us to know about this, even if the hectic pace of life in the 1990s made it unlikely that they, or we, could know it now.

This story makes me sad, though in truth only a little sad, since we have other friends not too far from this street with whom we play an occasional game of volleyball even now. But evidence that what has happened on our block is part of a widespread trend — that people in many places and across many economic levels no longer spend much time with their neighbors — awakens a greater sadness. It signals a worrisome loss of community on a larger scale. It is one more sign that the whole society has less glue than it used to have, less than it needs.

Deficits of time can also weaken the first, basic community of life and sometimes break it. Time for family is something most people say they crave but feel they have too little of, and they are worried what effect this is having. Will their children abandon the family's ways — the values, tastes, and habits that shape its life as a little community — for the ways of those with whom they spend more time? Will all members of the family attend to and nurture one another? Will the adults abandon one another? A recent study of the men and women who work for a large corporation reports that most find more warmth and shared purpose — more community — on the job than at home. Hours spent at each place are part of the reason. The amount and kind of time spent with others, the company we keep, are crucial to our sense of who we are and where we belong. When they change, so do we.

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Excerpted from "Receiving the Day"
by .
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